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The coder's block and vicious cycle of laziness.

Making games is hard. I haven't particularly been productive in the area in the last few months. You can even clearly see my commit activity graph. I've only started doing changes and fixes during the first week of Novemember.

Coder's Block

What happened? I don't really know. I just sort of lost the drive to do it. It's not the first time its happened. Sometimes, you just end up spending time doing other things and never get back to programming. Actually, that's not entirely true. I've got a bunch of improvements and features(https://github.com/K-Games/Ascension/issues) I'd LIKE to add but I put it off because it feels like it would take a long time to finish. All the while I WANT to do something else(like watching Anime ). Sometime later, I'll come up with feature/change I'd like to have and go through the same thought cycle again. This cycle repeats until eventually it builds up to a huge list of to-do's, then I don't know which to do first which leads putting all of it off. Basically, all my idea's became the biggest blocker to keep coding. It takes a monumental amount of effort to get back into it if nothing really motivates you. To be honest, if there was a following for the game, I'd be a lot more motivated to get things completed.

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This happens to everyone, and seriously, it's chronic within 99.9% of RPG Maker developers. So don't worry.

Motivation really is the key to it. If you do things alone that no one ever sees or cares about... why would you do it, right? You need to bring people into it somehow, whether it's recruiting team members, or posting sweet new updates on the Game Dev Refinery. That is actually one of the benefits of this system over forums... if you acheive a small milestone, you can post it up here. Because you'll be pationate about it and give us a background. Giving members here that emotional connection with you work is a great way to bring people in.

Now, I say this to a lot of people and I've been universally ignored. But it's great advice nonetheless - I think I get ignored because a lot of people don't want to put in the extra effort. Which is your classic lower-mid tier of RPG Maker users, but not the top dogs like you and me. The advice is basically that you need to have a plan and roadmap. Not just where your game is going but about development as well. I know exactly what you mean with coders block - you know, sometimes you go off on a tangent and deveopment this section and it's really cool, it takes ages, it's a neat side feature of the game. But then you've spent all this time and haven't really progressed the core game. I honestly think it would be more productive to flesh out a rough as heck garbage version of the whole game, then slowly go through with polish and changes. Rather than build the thing brick by consequtive brick.

I think it's quite important actually - demotivation grows as you perceive yourself to be wasting more and more time. You need to create that evolving document that sets out what your goals for the game are, timelines, roadmaps, development sequence, etc.